#ratralsis writing

In 1992, America was introduced to Kirby's Dream Land for the Gameboy. Not the Gameboy Color or Gameboy Advance, or even the Gameboy Pocket, but simply the fat brick that couldn't fit in anybody's pocket and ate four AA batteries at a time and displayed blurry green gameplay on a screen so small that some third party companies sold literal magnifying screens you could attach to make it easier to see. I know, because I had one as a kid.

The plot is spelled out in the game's manual: "On a tiny star somewhere far, far away from earth, there is a very special place known as Dream Land." Ah. Simple enough. In Japan, the country where the game takes place is called "Pupupu Land," and I don't know why that is. I somehow think Dream Land fits a bit better.

But that's not important.

(This is the second draft of the thing I posted yesterday. I have privated the first draft. If you read it, read this one, too. If you didn't read it, read this one instead.)

It's time I talked about two games from my childhood that are near and dear to my heart: Earthbound and Chrono Trigger.

That's right. I'm back on my bullshit again.

I've already written a little about Chrono Trigger and how it features the single greatest moment in storytelling. Three years ago, in fact. You can read it here. It's about a little frog man who shouts his name, and I still get misty-eyed to this day when I think about it. I'm not kidding.

Earthbound might be my favorite RPG, but I won’t pretend it’s perfect. Hell, I won’t even pretend it’s good. It’s riddled with frustrating features, from an extremely limited inventory to balance issues that make the whole game just feel like a mess to anybody who’s spent their life playing more polished and honed works.

Towards the end of the game, one of the characters, Jeff, the boy genius, gets access to one-use items called multi bottle rockets, and those can kill any boss for the rest of the game in a single hit. The only limitation is that they cost money to buy and they take up space in his inventory. Even beyond that, he gets access to a multi-use item called the heavy bazooka little earlier that makes it so you really shouldn’t ever use his regular attack again, because the heavy bazooka is just more powerful. Again, the only limitation is that it takes up one of his precious inventory spaces. In the final dungeon, your fourth party member, Poo, gets his ultimate attack skill, and you have zero bosses or major encounters left where it makes sense to use it. Poo himself joins the party so late in the game that he feels like an extra guy tacked on who has little use, and then he leaves again only to come back a short while later.

But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m someone who owns a hardcover copy of Clyde Mandelin’s “Legends of Localization” book on Earthbound, as well as the “passport” and the guide to playing it in Japanese. I own the fucking hat, shirt, Franklin Badge, and yo-yo that Limited Run Games sold a decade ago. I have played Earthbound from start to finish half a dozen times, and that’s not including ROM hacks or my playthrough of Mother 2, the Japanese version.

In short, I love Earthbound. But I have to admit that it isn’t for everybody. I know people in real life who bounced off of it, and while that hurts me, I can’t really tell them to get back into it and force themselves because it gets better. If you aren’t hooked early on, you won’t get hooked later.

Earthbound is a silly game. It’s a game with atmosphere. Personality, you could say. You play as Ness, a young boy who beats his enemies with a baseball bat and his slowly growing psychic powers. Ness was named in a prophesy by a supercomputer called the Apple of Enlightenment as one of four children who could save Earth from an extraterrestrial threat led by someone named Giygas. A bee, or a rhinoceros beetle if you insist on sticking with the Japanese version of things, meets Ness from ten years in the future and gives Ness an object called the Sound Stone, which Ness has to physically carry to eight different places around the world.

“Each of these locations is ‘Your Sanctuary,’” the bee tells Ness.

And when Ness finds the first location, it’s guarded by a giant ant who tells him, “This is the first ‘Your Sanctuary’ location.”

If you don’t gel with that kind of humor, where the term “Your Sanctuary” is used when referring to Ness specifically and then later just as a general term, you’re not gonna like Earthbound. If you don’t love Ness, the little boy with a backpack and a red hat, you won’t love Earthbound. But if you do, then you will.

Earthbound oozes with personality. Every enemy, every NPC, every dungeon. It’s all fun, and lighthearted. Ness is on a quest to save the world. He rescues the second of the prophesized four children, Paula, from a cult leader who plans to sacrifice her because a golden statue is bringing him under the influence of Giygas. It’s a dark and scary idea, but the way it’s handled is totally silly and fun. The cultists wear blue robes and the cult is called Happy Happyism. Their goal is to paint the world blue with literal paint. Their leader is Mr. Carpainter, and you defeat him by using the Franklin Badge that Paula gives to Ness. It reflects lightning, you see, and Mr. Carpainter uses his own psychic powers to shoot Ness with lightning.

Ness beats him with a baseball bat until Mr. Carpainter is freed from Giygas’s influence and becomes a good person again.

Ness and Paula and Jeff and Poo travel the world, finding the eight “Your Sanctuary” locations, fighting monsters and aliens and animals and humans who are under the influence of Giygas, and they defeat them all, and none of them are scary, not really. The scariest ones are still silly cartoon monsters. The guy who enslaves an entire village of sentient non-humans is a giant pile of slime called Master Belch who threatens you by saying he’ll make you feel the pain of true nausea. Those sentient non-humans are little pink genderless mouthless armless balls with feet who wear bows in their single hairs and call themselves Mr. Saturn.

One of those Mr. Saturns later helps Jeff’s father, the famous Dr. Andonuts, to invent a machine that can travel through time, because they are secretly extremely scientifically intelligent.

So the game never takes itself too seriously, even when dark and serious things happen. It always holds your hand, gently telling you that things will be alright. You’re leveling up, you’re getting stronger, and you can take on anything that comes your way. And you do. You defeat every foe. There are no scripted losses in Earthbound. When Ness lifts his bat and squares up against an opponent, whether it’s five cops in the back of a police station who’ve brought him there specifically to beat him up or it’s the legendary kraken trying to destroy the ship he’s using to cross the ocean, Ness wins. His friends are there with him, and the four of them are going to save the world.

Throughout the game, Ness and his friends slowly accumulate power. Ness, Paula, and Poo through their psychic power and training. Jeff through his incredible genius and inventions. Eventually, Ness unlocks all the power of the Earth itself by visiting the eight "Your Sanctuary" locations. Doing this allows Ness to delve into his own mind, defeat his inner darkness, and unlock all the power that the world itself has to offer.

There's a dog you can speak with after Ness receives his ultimate powerup who asks you, via Ness's ability to psychically communicate with animals, "At this point, you guys just might be the strongest force in the world, don't you think?" And you are. And you believe it. Why wouldn’t you?

So when Dr. Andonuts and Mr. Saturn tell you that they’ve found where Giygas is, and that it’s in the distant past, you know that the only thing you can do is travel back in time and defeat him once and for all. You can do it. You can do anything.

But you can’t handle Giygas.

You’re the strongest force in the world. Giygas isn’t from this world. Giygas is stronger than anything this world can offer. Giygas is a different thing entirely.

The strongest ant in the world, with all its deadly venom and powerful jaws and durable exoskeleton, cannot bite and kill the sun. And, when you face Giygas in his true form, free from the Devil’s Machine that binds and controls his power, that’s all you are to him. He’s become so powerful that he’s lost his mind, his sanity, all rationality, and he’s going to kill you. You’ve come so far, and you’ve become so strong, and you’re going to die, because he’s not playing by the same rules that you are. You can be level 99 if you want. You could be level 255. You could be level 1,000. It doesn’t matter. Giygas doesn’t have a level like you do. His power can’t be measured in numbers.

Chrono Trigger is one of the greatest RPGs of all time. This isn't just me saying it. It's one of those widely-considered-to-be-true subjective statements that everybody who ranks RPGs agrees with partly because it's a great RPG and partly because, I suspect, they don't want to be murdered in their sleep by fans.

I won't argue that it isn't a great RPG. I won't even argue that it isn't one of the greatest. I do think it is. If nothing else, it invented (or at least made known) the concept of "New Game+." You ever play a game to the end and then start over with all your gear and levels and shit? Yeah, thank Chrono Trigger for that. Obviously, other games did something similar. Zelda 2 on the NES let you start the game over with all your levels once you beat it, just so you could steamroll the bosses and, I guess, have a really fun time. But New Game+ as we know it now came from Chrono Trigger.

You start off with Crono, whose name lacks the "h" in "Chrono" in English, but don't you worry your beautiful, beautiful head, because it's spelled クロノ there, just like the game, クロノ・トリガー, and the item, the クロノ・トリガー. Ku, Ro, No. Kurono.

Crono is just some guy. He's a nobody, living an unimportant life in an unimportant time period. He couldn't matter less. He isn’t part of a prophecy. He doesn’t draw power from the planet like Ness does. He doesn’t have psychic powers. He gets pulled into events bigger than himself, decides he wants to make a difference in them, and, for his trouble, he dies. He's obliterated by the strongest thing there is, and it uses a fucking laser beam to do it. Kills him dead. Vaporizes him. You, the player, see his body turn to dust, and then that dust is burned up by the same laser.

But before that, he does do some things.

He wakes up one day in the year 1000 AD, because, somehow, the world in which he lives uses the Gregorian calendar and had some kind of event in year 0 that caused everyone to decide that it was time to start counting years right fucking then, and everything that happened before that just counts backwards and is called BC.

I have no explanation for this.

But there's a local fair celebrating the fact that it's 1000 AD, called the Millennial Fair. Or 千年祭, in Japanese, which means thousand year festival. All things considered, pretty fucking good translation.

I will try not to keep doing this thing of telling you what things are called in Japanese, but I can't help myself sometimes.

There he meets a random girl named Marle. Marle is also nobody. She's not important. She's a nothing, in the grand scheme of the world, though you might think she is, because she's secretly the princess Nadia.

Remember how I said I can't help myself sometimes? Marle is called マール (Ma-ru)in Japanese, and her real name is マールディア (Maldia). But you can change her name from Marle or マール to whatever you want. It doesn't have to be Marle or マール. But in the Japanese game, the only difference between マール and マールディア is the ending ディア, so whatever you name her in Japanese, they just add ディア to the end. You wanna name her クロノ instead of the main guy? Guess what, now there's a princess クロノディア (Kuronodia) in your game.

Anyway.

Marle insists on trying out a teleportation pod invented by Crono's childhood friend Lucca.

Lucca, though she doesn't realize it, has invented a device with which she can travel through time and change all of history, and she does so. Lucca's inventions, her scientific abilities, are what kick off all of the events in Chrono Trigger.

Everything that happens from here is thanks to her. She deserves the credit and the blame for all of it. She is the catalyst that changes history. That changes the fate of the world. Lucca discovers Time Gates, and she invents a device that allows her to open them as she wishes, and so she is the reason why you can travel through time to different eras.

At first, it’s an accident. Lucca’s teleportation pod interacts with Marle’s pendant, and it sends Marle through a Time Gate. Crono picks up the same pendant, Marle having left it behind, and follows. Lucca follows later, once she invents her Gate Key.

Eventually, through circumstances that might be worth getting into in a different essay, Crono, Marle, and Lucca find themselves visiting not just one time period, the distant past of 600 AD where they meet Frog for the first time, but also the distant future of 2300 AD. There they learn that the world has been destroyed by a creature named Lavos. Lavos emerged in the year 1999 AD, which a lot of us made jokes about when 1999 AD actually rolled around in real life, believe it or not, and rained fire and death upon the entire world.

It's… unclear why Lavos did this, to say the least.

But Lucca and Marle decide that they aren't willing to let this future happen. They insist that they want to change the future, just like they altered time before, in their trip to 600 AD earlier. Whether you as Crono decide you want to go along with this plan or not, you are forced to, and so the three of you, along with a robot Lucca has repaired and named Robo, are going to do it.

This is where the game starts letting you choose party members. You need to have Crono and Robo in your party for a while, but you can have either Lucca or Marle as your third party member. This is because of a story contrivance at first (and an even worse one later), but the point is that you have to choose whether you want to see the next few story events with Lucca by your side, or with Marle.

The only ways to see them both is to reload your save, or choose differently in New Game+.

And that's the gimmick. The rest of the game is like this. Things turn out the same no matter what you choose, but you do have to choose, and those choices determine what you see along the way. Your path up the mountain, as it were.

Believe it or not, none of this is actually relevant to the point I want to make in this whole fucking thing, but it's useful background info and might help you understand a little better when I get there.

There's a point in the game where the party contemplates how it is the Time Gates came to exist at all. For much of the game, they've suspected it was because of Lavos. They've learned how Lavos first crash-landed on the planet from outer space in the year 65,000,000 BC and burrowed deep below ground. Presumably, this is a rough estimate, but it might well be exactly 65,000,000 BC, and Lavos needed exactly 65,001,999 years to decide it was finally time to poke his head back up and destroy everything.

They've learned how, in the year 12,000 BC, a family of magically-gifted people attempted to harness the power of Lavos to gain immortality, and they failed, and Lavos destroyed them.

And they've learned how, in the year 600 AD, one of those same magically-gifted people attempted to summon Lavos from below ground to kill him personally, and he failed, and Lavos destroyed him, too.

But they've changed history. Changed the past. That guy in 600 AD? They stopped him from summoning Lavos, and instead another Time Gate was created, scattering the player party (which must include Crono and Frog, but could have Lucca, Marle, or Robo as the third) to one time period and that guy who was trying to summon Lavos to 12,000 BC.

Then they followed that guy, though they didn't know it, and interfered with history again. This time, the family trying to summon Lavos and harness his power succeeded. Their ocean palace didn't get destroyed. It rose from the ocean, and its queen attained immortality. Also, when Lavos was summoned, he killed Crono.

Oops!

So our heroes are left looking at all they've done throughout history and see that all they've really done is make things worse. Now, not only is Lavos still going to destroy everything in 1999 AD, there's an immortal queen living in a floating palace forever, and Crono, some random guy who had nothing to do with any of this, is fucking dead!

You know how I mentioned how Lavos is, like, really relevant in every other time period? You know the one time period you can visit where he isn't, at all? 1000 AD! Lavos doesn't do SHIT in the year 1000 AD! He arrives in 65,000,000 AD, he gets summoned by people who want to either leech off of his power or kill him in 12,000 BC and 600 AD, he destroys everything in 1999 AD, and then, in 2300 AD, he's just comfortably hanging around, I guess, him and his kids, preparing them to go off and destroy planets of their own.

Crono had no reason to get involved in any of this. Neither did Lucca, or Marle, for that matter. They weren’t relevant to Lavos or anything that Lavos does during his sixty-five million year sleep beneath the surface of the planet.

So why did they? Well, I said it already, right? Because they could, and that meant they felt that they had to. But that just opens up the next question. Why is is that they could?

And that’s the question being contemplated by the party themselves. Who is responsible for the Time Gates? Lucca didn’t create them. She just learned how to open them. And why do they specifically go to points in history where Lavos is relevant?

The most common theory, and one I subscribe to myself, is that the planet itself, in an attempt to save itself, creates its own Time Gates and nudges Crono, Marle, and Lucca into their first one. It helps them to learn the history of their world, specifically in the context of Lavos. They don’t learn, for example, the history of agriculture. Or architecture. Or war. Or language. They learn about Lavos. Because whoever this “entity” is, they want you to stop Lavos from wrecking shit.

And so, you, the player, are left at the point after Crono dies, realizing how badly you've fucked up, and you need to decide how you're going to fix it. The game opens up, and everything from here on out is optional. The game ends when you confront and kill Lavos, but what you do to prepare for that is up to you.

You can, for a start, find a way to save Crono. A lot of people talk about resurrecting Crono, but that's not what happens. Instead, you travel back to the moment immediately before Crono's death and swap him out with an identical doll given or sold to you by an unexplained wizard.

Seriously, that wizard is just… there. No background information is given about him. Even the Chrono Compendium doesn't have solid info on the guy. They just say he might be from the same kingdom as those other magic guys, but all we know from the game itself is that he can create perfect replicas of people as dolls and he can send them to any time period. It's bonkers. Just really shitty writing.

Anyway. This tactic means that, from Crono's perspective, he never died. He was ABOUT to be vaporized by Lavos, and then suddenly he's in a totally different time and place, totally fine. Time travel! You can use it to fix things! Things you fucked up!

So get fixing!

Destroy that floating palace!

Soothe the restless ghost of the knight Frog idolized!

Prevent Lucca's mother from having her legs mangled in a machine!

Mend things between Marle and her father, the king!

Stop the robots in the year 2300 AD from systemically committing genocide against what few humans remain!

Crush the remaining generals who worked for the guy who summoned Lavos in 600 AD!

Each of these sidequests, along with others, rewards you, the player, with powerful items and status boosts, not to mention experience points to level up. You use these to become strong enough to defeat Lavos.

Lavos isn't just the strongest thing in the world. He's stronger than the world. He's stronger than anything there is. He shows up in the year 1999 AD, bursting from the ground like lava from the world's most powerful volcano, and he fucks things up so bad that the fallout is still ruining things three centuries later. He isn't even doing anything by that point! The world was just that damaged by what he did in 1999!

And you have to stop him, and the only way to do that is to figure out how to use everything the planet has from every time period you can visit to put together a team of three people strong enough to physically confront and kill him.

Lavos has one thing in common with Crono, and it’s this: Lavos is also just some guy. He's not evil. He's not cruel. He is, as far as the game tells us, a mindless animal following his genetic programming. He arrives on the planet from someplace far, far away. It's possible that he was spawned by a creature just like him who destroyed a planet of his own, and that's the most likely explanation, but that's not confirmed. He could have been built by a crazy wizard for all we know. He could be unique. It could be that every other planet in the universe has already been destroyed by his species. Or it could be that most other planets evolve life that's capable of detecting one of those giant monsters deep underground and they kill it with a powerful drill and a bomb.

You can kill Lavos with a bomb, if you want to. Lucca can throw bombs. They damage Lavos.

But you do have to kill him, if you want to survive, and that's the most difficult thing there is to do in the world. Throughout history, many have tried. Lavos, mindless and ancient and powerful, rolled over them all.

Earthbound and Chrono Trigger both feature a team of unlikely heroes, the leader of whom is a literal child, fighting an extraterrestrial threat that is more powerful than anything in the world, and they fight him by traveling through time, and they have to win.

In Chrono Trigger, by traveling through time, you can gather all of the power of the world’s people throughout history, and accomplish things that couldn’t be accomplished through linear time. You fetch tools from the year 1000 AD to restore the grave of Cyrus, Frog’s best friend and the greatest knight of his generation, and allow Frog to bring peace to Cyrus and unlock Frog’s true power. You fetch a stone from the year 2300 AD and charge it with sunlight by placing it somewhere in the year 65,000,000 BC to charge until it’s 2300 AD again, and you use that to build Lucca’s most powerful gun. You find someone who looked for the legendary rainbow shell in the year 600 AD, travel forward in time to speak to his ghost to learn what he learned before dying, and then you go back to get it yourself, and you craft the strongest armor in the game and Crono’s strongest sword.

Without time travel, none of this would be possible. With time travel, you can scrape and claw your way to a higher level than anyone else ever has in all of history, in all of the world. You can become strong enough to take on Lavos. Because Lavos, just like you, has a level. And you can surpass that level.

Chrono Trigger tells you that if you work hard enough, you can overcome any obstacle, even if you have to bend time and space to your will to do it.

Earthbound tells you that sometimes, there's nothing at all you can do, and that some things truly are impossible.

Giygas can’t be beaten the same way that Lavos can. In the face of Giygas, Ness and his friends don’t have the option to flee through a Time Gate and power up again. You can't go back at all.

There's only one thing left to do. The only thing you can do. You pray.

Paula has the ability to call out for help to unseen forces. Her guardian angel, her mother calls it, in English. God, in Japanese. But no angel replies, no god answers. Instead, the real power is the friends you made along the way. People in the distant future you left behind, people affected by you, hear Paula's prayers, and they, too, begin to pray for your safety. They wish for you to win, even though they don't even know that you're struggling.

This is what hurts Giygas. This is how you can fight him. Not with force. With wishing really, really hard. Eventually, Paula runs out of people to pray to. Even this, it turns out, isn't enough. Even with all the wishes of everyone it's ever known, an ant on the surface of the sun is still going to die.

And that's when Earthbound does the ultimate rugpull. Paula keeps praying, if you tell her to, and one more person finally joins in. You, the player, known by the name you were asked to enter partway through the game by an NPC who broke the fourth wall to ask you to do so. You join in. You want them to win, too, right?

It's the game's director, Shigesato Itoi himself, looking you dead in the eye and saying, "You know this sucks, right?”

He sits down across from you, between you and the game, and he says, "You know that the game can't end this way, right? This would be a terrible ending. Why don't you do something about it? Oh, you can't? Because I wrote it so you couldn't? But you'd like to, wouldn't you? You'd really prefer it if the game ended in some way other than the only way that makes sense? With four children who never should have been asked to save the world dying, alone and afraid, as they face down the ultimate power?"

You are having a dialogue with the creator of the game in a way that you never can with the author of a book, or the director of a movie. He is asking you a real question, in this moment, and he looks back over his shoulder at the game you’re playing, and then he watches you, waiting, to see what you’ll do next.

And you look him back in the eye and you select the "Pray" command again and again, stubbornly, hammering on it, in pure desperation, knowing in your heart that you have sent Ness and Paula and Jeff and Poo to their deaths and that this is all you can do now, and in doing so you say, "Yes, please. I don't want it to end this way. I want these children to survive. I want a happy ending."

And he nods, and he says, "Alright."

And Giygas is destroyed. Not because of anything Ness and his friends did. Because of what you, the player, wished, and hoped for. Because of the power of that desire, and that desire alone, to rewrite the story, to make it into something different.

Chrono Trigger and Earthbound are both just stories. Neither of them is real. They offer you a way to see the story play out, and both end the same way: you do the impossible, and you win against a foe that's more powerful than anything the planet could muster on its own. You get your happy ending either way. So what's the difference? No matter what you do, you wind up seeing the same credits, the same final screen.

About 2.5 hours of work, not including the time I spent this morning mowing the lawn and emptying my wheelbarrow of the extra soil from when I prepped the garden last November by filling in low spots in my lawn.

But I got the three salvia and the one nepeta into my garden, though I'm going to worry forever that I didn't plant them at the right depth or amend the soil with the perfect amount of compost. I guess we'll see based on whether or not they're dying in a week. I watered heavily to get the soil to settle right after planting, so I'm going to let this dry and settle for 48 hours before I go back and add more mulch, since it's clearly gotten a lot lower since I put it down five months ago.

The plants are each in a rectangle about 30 inches wide by 24 inches deep, thus giving the marigolds a 16-inch perimeter and my roses, when I plant them, each a rectangle about 40 inches by 38 inches. That should be plenty of space for everything.

My first job at 15 was working for that company. I was paid under the table until I was 16. My dad wanted to keep paying me under the table, but I wanted an actual check and social security and so on.

Anyway.

But they sat in storage for about twenty years, along with a lot of her other machines, including a vintage Singer and White:

They were still in their carrying cases, so I wiped them down and polished them up and brought them to a local store to see if we could replace their corroded power cords and get them running again.

As it turns out, um, no! We could not. This was like finding a 70 year old car and taking it to an auto dealership and saying I wanted new brake pads and tires for it. Yes, it could be done, but those parts aren't made anymore. It would cost more to repair these machines than it would be worth. That's not even considering the power cords, just things like bobbins and pedals.

So I took the money I was going to spend on repairing them and bought a new machine. Specifically, a Janome Mystyle 100:

I've never owned a sewing machine before, and this is by far the most modern I've even laid eyes on. It's beyond anything my mom was using 20 years ago, that's for sure. It can do a dozen different stitches! I was blown away when the employee at the store gave me the demo and let me try some out!

Then I leaned to one side and saw, from my position at the end of their row of demo machines, that the ones that weren't their cheapest and most basic model could do dozens, or even over a hundred. With goddamn touch screens on em!

When the fuck did that happen???

But the Mystyle 100 is a workhorse that they often sell to schools, they said, and while they do sometimes come in for repairs it's at a much lower rate than more expensive machines, especially factoring in how many they sell and the fact that students don't give a damn about being gentle on equipment. I figured that was good enough for me.

So I guess I own a sewing machine now, and know roughly how to use it. I'm supposed to schedule a one on one session for an hour with someone at the store where I bought it to really learn the intricacies of it.

At which point I'll be able to make, well, doll clothes, I suppose. Maybe even a certain rag doll sometime?

In theory, I could make my own clothes, but I'd prefer not to. I used to wear clothes my mom made for me as a kid. I'm kind of over it.

On the evening of April 1, I found this spider, the biggest I've ever seen on my property, just hanging out on the wall inside of my garage, illuminated by my headlights as I pulled in. I took some photos of her (I'm guessing she's female due to lack of pedipalps and literally nothing else) and figured I'd never see her again. But she actually stuck around for the next three days. I would keep going out to the garage and seeing if I could find her, and she moved down to the bricks at the base of the wall, where I, um, keep a neat stack of loose bricks. It's normal! She moved near the wall and leaned into the crack between the brick and the wall, so I assumed she was waiting to ambush something. Then she moved further from the wall to peer between a couple of bricks, for, I assume, the same reason. She looked to me like she was dragging herself a little bit, though. I don't know spiders well enough to know if that was just my imagination.

Sadly, on the morning of April 4, I found her on the floor next to the bricks, on her back, legs curled up. I was sad, but I moved on with my day. That evening, I decided that I should move her body outside, so she could rejoin the cycle she'd been part of instead of leaving her body to attract ants or to rot in my garage. When I swept her up into a dustpan, though, her legs started moving. So I gently placed her back onto the floor in the garage, at least, as gently as I could. I think I may have hurt her, because she immediately flipped back onto her back. I tried again, gently blowing on her to see if I could encourage her to try again to right herself, and she actually did, but then stopped moving.

I don't want to share photos of that part. I don't want to share photos of her as she was dying. Because she was, and I knew it, and she was suffering. So I did the only thing I could think to do, and I tried to end it for her quickly. I feel pretty guilty about that, but I don't think that leaving her to slowly die in my garage would have been the kinder option.

I'm pretty sure she was just an ordinary wolf spider, but she was huge and she was cool and I'm glad I got to know her for those three days. I'll never know what happened to cause her to lose control and lie on her back like that for at least eight hours, and I just have to make my peace with that.

I feel a little weird saying I'll miss her, but I guess I will. It's better that I got closure, though, right? So I don't have to worry about her leaving the garage and coming into my house. My garage is detached, so she'd have had quite a walk to get there, mind you. If I had seen her in my house, I would have found her a lot less cool and a lot more scary. I'm absolutely terrified of spiders when I find them in my home, except for the little cobweb spiders under a shelf or my basement stairs or something. I leave them alone. I've moved a couple of spiders slightly smaller than her that I've found in my house out to my garage, for whatever that's worth, and one that was hanging out on the exterior wall of my house in the enclosed patio area. But she was the biggest.

Anyway. Sorry the photos aren't very good. I didn't want to get too close to her, so I just zoomed in with my phone camera as much as I could, and I used a flash. I hope I didn't spook her too badly. If she knew about me at all, it was as a big creature who came kind of close but not so close that she felt like moving.

On January 10, I made my first wooden doll, Mai, and she was perfect. On March 10, I finished her, and I wrote about it.

But on February 1, I made my second doll using clothes pegs, a 1.5-inch wooden ball, and a thin dowel rod for a neck, which was glued into the torso clothes peg. She wasn't perfect. She was based on the doll Penny from "Adventures with Penny," a site that seems to no longer be available. But the name Penny comes from the old term for wooden peg dolls, that they were "farthing" dolls or "penny" dolls because, well, they were cheap. I'm confident you can still find guides on how to build dolls out of clothes pegs if you try. I could.

I quickly realized the limitations of this build. She had no elbows or knees, and she couldn't raise or lower her arms. Only spin them. Unless, of course, I left a lot of free wire and let it sort of wiggle and bend around. I didn't like that.

So I iterated. I cut a pair of wooden beads in half and added them as hip and shoulder spacers. Now she could raise and lower her arms, if only slightly, and she didn't look so obviously stick thin. The width helped quite a lot.

Then I started thinking about how to make elbows and knees. I looked up old marionette designs. Looked at ball-jointed dolls. Looked at stop-motion dolls. I considered magnets, I considered drilling into the center of the limbs and gluing in little hinges. I eventually started iterating on using a small wire loop to connect upper and lower limb pieces, and sanding the lower limb pieces so that they could only bend one way. Finally, I had a design figured out.

Once I saw her sitting with her hands in her lap on the paint can in my basement, I knew I'd figured her out. Where Mai was a playful little kid, this doll was calm and satisfied. She was formal and elegant in a way that Mai wasn't. In the same way that I realized Mai's name, I realized that this doll's name was Sora.

I don't have any better reason why than I did for Mai, I'm afraid. I realize "Sora" was also an AI video generating service, and the hero of the Kingdom Hearts games. I don't know what to tell you. I just think of it as a name. Her name. They both have Japanese names. I don't know what to tell you about that, either.

I started priming and getting the first coats of spray paint onto Sora at the same time as Mai, but I couldn't work on Sora in earnest until Mai was finished. So Sora sat, in pieces, without a face, for several weeks. That was just how it was. It was upsetting to see her like that, on scrap paper that was stained with the same color spray paint as her skin. It looked like a crime scene photo. Like she'd been torn apart, each piece staked with toothpicks or held down with masking tape so I could spray them evenly.

But time passed, and work continued, and eventually it was time to work on Sora. Painting her face was a milestone that stressed me out an absolutely incredible degree. I was so worried about screwing it up. I won't claim she turned out perfect, but she's as good as any doll I've painted, I can say that much. Her slightly w-shaped lopsided smile and her shaded eyes give her a lot more personality than I expected from her.

Once her face was painted, I reassembled her at last. I'd used steel wire before, but I switched to brass for the final build. I figured that it wouldn't stand out quite so much against her faded rose-colored skin. I also used gold crimp covers on her shoulders and hips for that same reason.

The chair gave me headaches. I didn't realize I'd bought balsa wood to build it, and balsa is the worst material in the world for building even doll furniture. I had many, many pieces of scrap and broken wood left when I was done with that chair. But I carefully drilled shallow holes in the seat of the chair and into a second board to act as the base, for stability, and got it glued together. There's a piece of felt under a piece of stretched modal fabric to act as upholstery, a little cushion for Sora to sit on. The chair is very slightly leaned back, which both lifts her knees and helps break up her silhouette so it isn't quite so obvious that her legs are too short for her body, and allows her to lean back and rest against the back of the chair when she sits.

If the chair gave me headaches, the clothes gave me nightmares. The skirt was, of course, the simplest part. A single piece of brown fabric, cut so that it's longer in front, with a piece of velcro glued and sewn onto the back and a piece of black ribbon to act as a belt sewn onto the sides so I can tie it around her.

But that shirt. Easily the most complex thing I've ever tried to build, even though it's only four pieces. The piece covering her chest and back is a single piece, folded in half, with a slit in the back so I can put it onto her and close it around her. The sleeves are each as wide around as the torso piece, pentagons with three right angles, like home plate in baseball. I rolled them into tubes and used a running stitch to sew them closed, going down and then back up in a mockery of a backstitch. Then I sewed the long pointy part of the tube to the torso of the shirt, but only the top. The shirt's actually open on the bottom of the sleeves. If Sora were to raise her arms, you'd see her armpits. But if I'd sewn it all the way around, it would have bunched up and looked terrible, so I decided to simply create the illusion of closed sleeves by keeping her arms down.

The fourth piece is the little piece of blue ribbon. I like it. I think it's a cute touch. That's all I have to say about it.

In all, the shirt took me close to a week of prototyping, designing, and trying things out. There are a lot of pieces of scrap fabric from sleeves that didn't work out, and once I'd finished sewing it, I had to turn it inside-out to hide the seams and get it onto her. I added a few stitches in the back to close it shut around her. She's sewn into that shirt and can't take it off. She doesn't need to. She's not a dress-up doll.

Once she was dressed, I think I did a fairly good job of hiding those crimp covers on her shoulders and on her hips. Yeah, the shirt looks a little stiff, with the sharp shoulders. But that's because she has little metal balls coming out of her there. And I could have tapered the bottoms of the sleeves a little bit, so they wouldn't have looked so loose. But it's too late for that now. I'm not in a rush to spend another five hours making another shirt.

I don't have a sewing machine, so I have to do all this sewing entirely by hand. It takes a while!

Her hat went through multiple iterations as well, but this was the best one I could make, I'm afraid. I think it reads as a beret, more or less, and that's all I can hope for from it.

So then it was the home stretch. I wanted to make a book for her to read. I wanted it to look like she was sitting in her chair with a book in her lap, and Mai sitting next to her, like they were together. A pair of sisters, or friends, with Sora reading her book either to Mai or just on her own while Mai did her own thing. That, of course, meant I had to make a book!

The book is made from a piece of cardboard with two layers of masking tape on each side, painted dark blue, with a tiny piece of paper glued on one side like a title block and a slightly larger one on the other side to create the illusion of pages.

It's all about illusions, I'm afraid. Making anything for dolls at this scale is. Sorry if that's disappointing. Hiding the crimp covers. Hiding the short legs. Hiding the fact that her shirt isn't a real shirt. That her book isn't a real book. But knowing how the trick works doesn't mean the magic isn't real.

I painted the base of the chair gray to blend in with the planned rug I wanted to put her on, then assembled a 12x12x12 display case. I stuck white felt to the back with fun-tak and placed purple felt on the bottom, with none. Then the dolls themselves.

And now they're there, Sora and Mai.

Mai came first and she is perfect, because she was everything she needed to be. She proved to me that I could make a doll if I wanted to.

Sora came second and she's everything I hoped she would be. Joints, clothes made of actual knit fabric, a painted face, and props to tell a story. She's a display doll, it's true, but I can make other clothes for her someday if I want to. Other props. For now, I'm happy seeing the two of them together, spending time in their room, enjoying each other's company.

You might ask, looking at Sora, why I bothered with gold crimp covers and brass wire if her clothes cover them anyway. I don't know what I can tell you if you ask that. The fact is, whether those things are visible or not, I know about them. I know where her wires are, and what it took to get them there. I know about the literal blood and sweat that's sealed under all those layers of paint.

I do mean literal; I bled on her at one point while building her. Kind of hard to remove blood from wood, so I painted over it.

So where do I go from here? The dolls are going to become what I call a "weekend project." When I have a day off, I'll work on them. I'll make Mai a new dress. I'll teach myself how to carve hands and feet out of blocks of wood. I'll eventually, and I'm not giving myself a deadline here, build a true ball-jointed doll who won't have crimp covers or wires sticking out of her anywhere. Who can wear real clothes, and hold real poses.

Will she be perfect? Probably not. Will she be everything I hope she will be? I don't know. But she'll be here eventually.

Until then, I want to say this one thing, which is very important and needs to be stated plainly.

I realize that I'm not good at making dolls. I might be pretty good at painting, but I'm not good at carving or at sewing. I do a lot of winging it. A lot of improvising. A lot of looking stuff up and experimenting and iterating. I approached every step of this process like an engineer. Building Sora was never meant to be an artistic endeavor. She was an engineering problem, to be solved by an engineer. That's how I always thought of her.

Even so, I can't deny that I was making purely subjective decisions. I was choosing things based on what felt right. What I considered to be the "truth" of the character. I saw her sitting on that paint can and I knew, in my core, that she was a calm and elegant little girl reading a book, and her name was Sora, and even if I can't explain that, it's the truth. That became the engineering problem I needed to solve: how do I bring Sora to life so that she looks in the real world anything at all like how I know she looks in my head?

And, whether I like it or not, that made it an art project, too. I don't think of myself as an artist. I am, at best, a novice artist. I work at things and I try to improve as I go, but God knows there are a lot of people better at this than I'll ever be!

It makes me sad when I see people talk about the things they'd like to make, like to build, like to write, like to learn, if only they had the time or the natural ability. I'm an old man, and I decided I wanted to learn how to hand-sew tiny doll clothes, so I did. Is the result amazing? No, not at all. But it's better than if I hadn't tried. If I hadn't tried, there'd be nothing at all.

And yeah, it took me two months to make each doll. That's a lot of time, but I'll let you in on a little secret: the months would have passed whether I was spending my spare time working on them or not. So why not do something I wanted to do with that time?

I doubt I'll ever inspire a generation, but if I can get even one person to look at my dolls and say "Hell, I could do better than that," and then prove it, then I'll feel like I changed the world.

It was specifically after I mentioned how I had decided to try making articulated dolls and how it was surprisingly involved.

But I just thought, hey, no, it's not artistic. It's an engineering problem to solve. I'm an engineer. A math guy. A science guy.

Sure, I started off by painting models and figurines. And sure, I painted tiny details on the faces of the dolls. And hand sewed their clothes. And built them tiny wooden upholstered furniture. And sure I've bought blocks of wood and sets of wood carving tools so I can hand carve the next one.

And sure I've written two novels, but it's not like they're published anywhere.

But that doesn't make me artistic, does it? That doesn't make me an artist, right? I'm a dabbler. A hobbyist. A guy who tries new things just to learn them and see if it can be done.

Who cares if I get emotionally invested? What's it matter if I decide that I need to express a totally subjective idea and bring it to life? That just means I saw a problem and decided to solve it. Like engineers do. Like Leonardo da Vinci or Michaelangelo. Great mathematicians and engineers who, you know, just happened to do some art stuff on the side. I'm not at their level!

I have a degree in computer science! Three, actually, if you want to count my two associate's degrees! I never studied art! I'm self taught! Except for those four or five years of writing classes! And all the YouTube videos I watched and the $18 doll making pdf I bought! Those don't count! Probably!

In theory, I can now do things like, as I said six weeks ago, "chew gum or bite into a hot dog with that front tooth." In reality, that's still quite painful. Even chewing gum becomes painful after about ten minutes because of how the tooth is connected to all my back teeth via a ligament that I won't pretend to fully understand, so just, like, trust me, bro.

I haven't been working on any writing for about two months now while I work on my dolls. Not because I'm too busy with the dolls, but because I've been in constant pain and needed some time off of writing. But I do need to get back to writing. I've finished my first novel, more or less, but I need to do some revisions and then I'll probably go through and touch up the whole thing one final time. Then I'll start trying to get it published. I started working on it back in January of 2020. Pre-COVID. Six years ago.

I'm hoping to get back to writing once I finish the second doll. That's also when I'll write a retrospective post introducing her and revealing her name like I did with Mai. She does have one. A name, I mean.

I already know I want to make a ball-jointed doll next, but that will take me a lot longer because I have to actually carve the pieces for that one. I don't know how to do that. I bought a guide online for like $18. This one, on Etsy, for $18. It's actually more a guide on how to carve the pieces for the doll than it is on how to string it together, but it does cover that, too. It's a pretty good guide. I know $18 seems like a lot, and it is, but I think I got $18 worth of instruction out of it.

I don't have a name for the third doll yet. I'll probably figure it out as I build her. She'll need to be bigger than the first two dolls, because her torso and the upper halves of her limbs need to be hollow for the elastic string. I'm hoping not too much bigger. Probably eight or nine inches tall, I figure. I'd also like to carve her with an actual torso consisting of a chest, waist, and pelvis with hips. But we'll see, I guess.

I'm not so secretly actually a huge pervert, but I don't really want to carve a wooden doll with huge breasts and a detailed ass. That's just not really something I want to do, at least, not for my first ball-jointed doll.

The guide lays out a doll with a head, upper torso, two upper arms, two lower arms, two hands, a waist, a pelvis, two upper legs, two lower legs, and two feet. My plan is to streamline that from sixteen pieces down to eleven by combining the hands and lower arms, the feet and lower legs, and the head and chest. So she won't have the ability to turn her wrists, ankles, or neck, but that will still give her a lot of poseability and massively reduce the difficulty of stringing everything together. I'd also like to give her actual hair using wig wefts glued to her head under a hat to hide the gap on top of her head where I don't really know how to get decent coverage using wig wefts. Ideally, a hat with a brim and not yet another beret. I've been making berets because they're the easiest hats in the world to make.

Anyway.

Tomorrow I'll start making a chair for the second doll, and then clothes for her. Then she'll be done. I bought a few cheap shirts at Goodwill that are made of a jersey knit fabric that I'm hoping to upcycle into doll clothes. We'll see how that goes. But felt won't really work here. I need a thinner material that drapes a little more.

But that's all just pie in the sky stuff for right now.

Tonight, I have a partially healed hole deep in my skull that still causes me constant pain (though less than it did six weeks ago, that's for damn sure) and a naked doll sitting on a tape measure in my basement.

That's life, baby. Nothing ever really ends. We're all working on something, always, and we all leave behind unfinished business when we die. My unfinished business will probably be something dumb like a song on piano because I'll have started studying how to play piano in my old age.